The End of the Project: Futurity in the culture of catastrophe

Departing from the transformation of everyday life into “projects,” this article explores the notion of a future that is radically open, yet foreclosed by catastrophe, notably in relation to climate change. Drawing on Agamben's The Time that Remains, it explores an alternative futurity that interpolates a Pauline messianism with recent thinking on cosmological extinction and capitalism read through the Freudian death drive. In seeking to cheat an economic regime of a violence that paradoxically feeds off the failure to prevent its own destruction, the suggestion is that “the time of the project” itself must be brought to an end.